NEW PAINTINGS OF ORDINARY INCIDENTS

Kristin Calabrese, Jonathon Hornedo, Laura Krifka, Jake Kean Mayman, Cait Porter, Paul Pretzer

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One by one, days go by. Turning into weeks, then months, eventually years and decades. In this inevitable march of time it is nearly impossible to not fall into routines, to get accustomed to surroundings without giving them a second thought. Despite being mundane, these spans are often still busy, yet things become expected. That is the starting point for this exhibition: the overlooked, interstitial passages, where the bulk of life takes place.

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The six artists in this exhibition make paintings that closely scrutinize the ordinary, a process that can be unnerving. We take for granted the way things are as they are; the patterns our days fall into being organized, the manner in which household products were designed, the shapes and features fruits and vegetables evolved into. Disturbing oddities and unexpected beauty can be found lurking.                                                                    

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Kristin Calabrese has said "My realistic oil paintings tell the truth when I can't. They elucidate conflicts between how I think things should be vs. how things seem to be. The light in the paintings is bright and even. My brush strokes are un-expressionistic.” Her painting Saving My Eggs pauses a passing quotidian moment. A sink full of dirty dishes and cracked eggs, artifacts of the passing of daily life. Carefully and meticulously captured here in oil paint, the forms and objects take on unexpected elegance and weight, but it is left ambiguous whether this effort is meant to celebrate or condemn, or rather as an open ended prompt to keep looking.

 

Jonathon Hornedo has made a recent series of enlarged still life paintings, looming at eight by six feet in size, and picturing both recognizable and unnamable elements. The scale and subject matter suggest a relationship to the body, psychology, and the thin boundary between fact, fantasy, and belief. The compositions, lighting, and color create an unmistakable feeling of tension. They dramatize the banality of domesticity.

 

Laura Krifka’s Everything But presents a chrome sink before a mirror in a typical kitchen. The mirror seems to reflect the scene into an almost infinity. The familiar very quickly appears strange, uncanny. The absence of a figure, a human presence, becomes palpable and haunting, an unshakable loneliness.  And the reflected scene shows signs of reality breaking down: the door is backward, the light switches are turned on their sides. The world, especially these anonymous spaces, exist somewhere between reality and how we recall them. For Krifka there is an unavoidable question about the existence, or lack, or a greater order.

 

Jake Kean Mayman makes paintings that investigate the objects and systems that serve as both filter and lens, mediating our interactions with, and experiences of, the broader world. He creates tableaux of humble objects. Compositionally isolated by solid color field backgrounds, they feel like laboratory settings; sterile chambers for scientific study. His close observation is applied to both everyday objects, like crumpled graph paper, clothing, or toys, as well as to subtly obsolete ones, such as outdated ergonomic keyboards or factory controls. The effort to design and produce this abundance of products is brought to mind, as are questions about their efficiency and longevity. Viewers are left to ponder the purpose of all these “things” we fill our lives with.

 

Cait Porter’s paintings of mundane household objects, gently caressed in soft light and shadow, embedded with memories, fears, anxieties, become   surprisingly intimate. Cropped along   unexpected edges, viewed from unusually personal vantage points, they force a new persecutive on the objects and create moments of recognition. They highlight and record the endless repetition of living similar days, over and over and over again. Despite the monotony there are still undeniable passages of elegance to be found. In the way a cheap electrical cord snakes through space, a stained wall can remind of an Arron Siskind photograph, or the soft glow of a lamp can make an undeserving moment ethereal.   

 

Paul Pretzer adroitly and perpetually strikes a balance in his painted images between humor and uneasiness. Aspects of his compositions prompting a push and pull between laughing and being disturbed. The elements in The Downfall sound rather benign when described, a few tomatoes, a slightly rotten carrot, and a flower in a glass of water. However, in actually looking at the painting the tomatoes look both sinister and fragile… as does the carrot in its imminent mortality. The flower, picked from the earth, its days numbered, is another memento mori. This small arrangement carries the heavy message that the passage of time cannot be stopped.